A Woman of Paris

Charles Chaplin's "drama of fate" is really a drama of chance and irony, as befits the crossroads of Victorian and Jazz Ages. "Marriage or luxury" is the main dilemma, De Maupassant and Pinero are the models, Stroheim has nothing on its cruelties. The village lass (Edna Purviance) is locked out by her stern father, she and her suitor (Carl Miller) decide to elope together, tragedy strikes so off to the city she goes alone. (The train is an off-screen figure of spectral light surely noticed by Murnau.) The second act deftly sketches a Gallic Babylon of pashas and flappers, a bored gigolo sips soup with his wrinkled benefactor while the heroine, lushly gowned and plumed, relishes truffles boiled in champagne with "the richest bachelor in Paris" (Adolphe Menjou). "Well, such is life." The soigné rapport between courtesan and boulevardier gradually reveals the cracks of alienation: She wants "a real home, babies, a man's respect" yet rushes to retrieve the necklace angrily hurled out the window, he's mightily tickled by the theater of it all. A crucial emotion sinking into Purviance as she has her back to the camera, a crisscross of class tensions around a massage table, Menjou at the ball letting out a sigh that barely parts his lips—a clown-tragedian's conscious crystallization of technique and gesture, to be analyzed six ways from Sunday by Lubitsch and Sternberg and Ozu. "I don't know which of your moods amuses me most." A tale of the autonomous muse who rejects adulation and the pious painter fallen next to the fountain nude, for Chaplin and Purviance as much a snapshot of a dissolving romance as The Lady from Shanghai. Roué and mistress go different ways, only to cross paths again in Monsieur Verdoux. With Lydia Knott, Clarence Geldart, Charles K. French, Betty Morrissey, and Malvina Polo. In black and white.